Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 442

July 18, 2011: If You Like This Blog…

… I've got one you'll love! Starting next Monday, July 25th, and continuing for the next three months and a bit, the New England American Studies Association will be running a pre-conference blog at http://neasaconference.blogspot.com. As you'll see from the schedule below, each week one or two of our panels will be the focus, and panelists will be blogging about their prospective papers, parallel or related interests and ideas, general American Studies questions, and/or whatever else they want to share. As with any Blogspot blog, there will be comment sections for each post, and they're entirely open—the goal of this blogging is not only to get conference participants talking to each other and thus get the conference off to an early and good start, but also to involve as many interested folks as possible (whether you'd be able to attend the conference or not, although of course you're very welcome; see www.neasa.org for lots more info about it).So starting next Monday, please check out that blog regularly (or check it out right now too, as there's a great sample/starting point post up from a NEASA Council colleague of mine, Jonathan Silverman of UMass Lowell). The more interested AmericanStudiers we get reading and responding to those posts, the better and richer and more meaningful the conversation will be!More tomorrow,BenPS. Those links again:1)      The blog: http://neasaconference.blogspot.com2)      NEASA: http://www.neasa.org3)      OPEN: Any conference or blog questions or ideas to share?

July 15, 2011: On the Other Hand

I feel as if yesterday's post was a bit harsh on the world of sports, especially since that world has given me a huge amount of happiness, both as a fan (particularly of the Atlanta Braves, but also of the University of Virginia men's soccer and women's basketball teams, among many others) and as a player (particularly on my own many soccer teams, but also tennis, cross country, and others). Of course I was focused on a very specific subset of experiences and perspectives within that world, and I hold to my take on them (and will, I must admit, be rooting hard for Japan in the Women's World Cup final on Sunday—the combination of underdog status and what that nation has recently experienced makes it impossible for me to do otherwise). But I feel it important to highlight here one example of many of how sports can also provide moments that are truly inspiring, not only on but also and more significantly off the field.This particular example is not only deeply inspiring, but also very surprising: former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin has been known since his playing days as one of the most extreme members of a Cowboys team full of extremes, a man whose love for drugs and women and fast cars and etc. always threatened to dwarf even his prodigious athletic gifts. In this stunningly honest and impressive Out magazine cover story, http://www.out.com/slideshows/index.asp?slideshow_title=Michael-Irvin-The-Playmaker-Preaches&theID=1#TopIrvin fully owns up to that legacy, and makes it a compelling part of his narrative about how and why he came to support marriage equality (the story's explicit focus). But even more compelling and impressive than that, and even more moving and powerful than his love and respect for his late brother, is Irvin's worry about a conversation he might have at the pearly gates: "The last thing I want is to go to God and have him ask, 'What did you do?' And I talk about winning Super Bowls and national titles. … I didn't do anything to make it a better world before I left? All I got is Super Bowls? That would be scary."At times it can indeed feel that the world of sports boils down to winning, and thus, to parallel yesterday's thoughts, to winners and losers, us and them. But as Irvin recognizes here, there's more to it than that—and while his perspective might be said to be transcending sports, it is also coming very directly out of it, building on his successes and fame within it to make this amazing case for social and legal and human equality. As a kid growing up rooting for the Washington Redskins, I was supposed to hate Michael Irvin and the Cowboys; now? Definitely a fan.More tomorrow,BenPS. Any inspiring sports figures or stories you'd highlight?

July 14, 2011: Not a Fan

There are lots of reasons why I love The English Patient (1996; the film, that is—I'll admit to having only read a bit of the novel after seeing the movie and being left cold), but at the top of the list is its honest and compelling portrayal of something I wrote about in my post on Dresden: the ways in which even the most noble or "good" of wars comes with so much inevitable and horrific badness, and most especially the way every war necessitates the creation of an "us vs. them" narrative in which anybody from within the wrong set of borders becomes an inhuman and unimportant enemy. Many if not all of the movie's central storylines and character arcs drive home that point, but it's made most succinctly in an exchange between the titular patient (Count Laszlo Almásy) and his Canadian nurse Hana. She has expressed happiness to have found by surprise a fellow Canadian in their Italian setting, and when Almásy wonders "why people are always so happy when they collide with one from the same place," she replies, "There's a war. Where you come from becomes important." "Why?" Almásy counters. "I hate that idea."Almásy has his own very personal and very understandable reasons for hating that idea, but even without having gone through the kinds of traumas he has by this time in his tragic life experienced, I share his passion on the subject. It is perhaps human nature to identify with those with whom we share a home land in this way, and of course such communal connections have the potential for great benefit (at least if we can use them as a starting point for, y'know, actually caring about the well-being of all of our fellow community members); but those connections come, again, almost inevitably and much more dangerously with the need first to contrast ourselves with communities outside of our own and then, more often than not, to hate the individuals within those communities simply because of where they come from. It's obvious how and why that happens during wartime, although I would still argue that too often we take it for granted or refuse to acknowledge that it's happening, and certainly that we don't push back nearly hard enough against it. Much less obvious and certainly much less extreme, but also less understandable and to my mind even more frustrating and ridiculous, is the way in which this happens in the world of sports.The most overt and broadly communal example of that trend would have to be the concept of soccer hooligans (particularly in Europe), about which I know as much as you'd expect from an AmericanStudier. But here in the States we have our share of horror stories that confirm this trend—the San Francisco Giants fan who was beaten savagely outside of Dodger Stadium earlier this season, the New York Giants fan who got on the wrong bus after a game against the Jets and was likewise beaten within an inch of his life, and so on. And even if we dismiss those kinds of incidents as outliers or as caused by deranged individuals whose issues ultimately have nothing to do with sports—and I don't necessarily do so—the fact remains that rooting passionately for a sports team seems in almost every instance to require rooting with equal passion against another, and more exactly hating not only that opposing team but its hard-core fans with the same passion. Up here in New England I hear exhibit A for that case every time the conversation on sports radio turns to the New York Yankees, but I imagine every American has a go-to example of this trend in his or her own neck of the woods.I'm thinking of this today because of the thrilling run by the US women's soccer team, which has brought them to the upcoming World Cup final. I've watched bits and pieces of their matches, and certainly have enjoyed their inspired play, particularly at the goaltending and forward positions. But I will freely admit that the constant cheers of "USA! USA!," both among fans who have traveled to Germany to attend their matches and among many of my fellow Americans watching back here, have made me root a bit less fervently. It just seems like those chants are inevitably accompanied by boos and insults, and perhaps worse, directed at the other team, and by extension the other nation; and when it comes to that I am indeed not a fan. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      A hugely powerful moment from the film's conclusion (spoiler alert!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KwuHH2mDnI&feature=related2)      An interesting scientific take on violence and sports fans: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2006/07/violence_in_sports_fans_1.php3)      OPEN: What do you think?

July 13, 2011 [Scholarly Review 2]: Encyclopedic

Maybe this is just me, but I think we scholars (and perhaps we adult Americans more broadly) tend to overlook hard-copy encyclopedias as a serious and valuable scholarly resource for analytical work; certainly we recognize them as useful for younger students, and certainly many of us visit Wikipedia for quick (if somewhat suspect) information about a variety of topics, but when it comes to serious scholarly or analytical engagement with complicated issues, I'd be willing to bet that many of us would consider encyclopedias far too summative and basic to be of much use. Yet the reality is that we (or I'll just change that to me—I could be entirely on an island here, and don't want to project my own myopia onto everybody else) have developed that perspective in large part because our youthful experiences were with a particular, indeed basic and summative kind of encyclopedia—the Britannica type, featuring a couple of very general pages each on pretty much every topic under the sun (and on the sun, and on pretty much every nighttime topic too).I spend most of my summer writing time at a table in the Needham (MA) Public Library that's located right next to the reference section, and I can indeed attest that such ginormous encyclopedias do still exist in hard-copy form, and do seem most often to be consulted by those few local high schoolers who haven't abandoned all on-hand research for the lure of the web. But the truth is that such encyclopedias have been complemented very thoroughly in recent decades by much more specialized, focused, in-depth, and scholarly works, references that offer valuable information and/or scholarly perspectives that could be of use for any meaningful work. In terms of the former, I recently wandered through the reference stacks while waiting for my computer to start and discovered the two-volume Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America: Primary Documents collection; the main EMA seems to be slightly more Britannica-like, but the Primary Documents collection is really unique and interesting, providing everything from memoir and fiction to photographs and news reports, all representing a pretty comprehensive, alphabetized list of ethnic American communities (from Afghan Americans to Vietnamese Americans, and with 88 more in between). The selections of course comprise only a handful of the literally millions of texts that could be chosen for each topic, so they are not, in that sense, encyclopedic at all; but they nonetheless provide (on first glance, at least) an exemplary snapshot of both the many genres and media that constitute American Studies and the diverse community that is 21st century America. When it comes to the collecting scholarly perspectives kind of encyclopedia, I don't have to wander anywhere to find one of the most impressive (and certainly the most relevant to this blog) specimens: the Encyclopedia of American Studies was largely the brainchild of, and is still edited by, my graduate school and dissertation advisor, Temple University Professor Miles Orvell; and because of that connection I've been fortunate enough to contribute a bit to the EAS, both in writing four articles and in various behind-the-scenes work on the still-expanding (though, understandably, subscription-only) online version. Not to plagiarize from myself, but I can't highlight the EAS's strengths any better than I did in a recommendation I wrote for Professor Orvell: "I would just stress here how much both the project and his perspective on it truly modeled for an American Studies approach: by that I mean partly the interdisciplinarity, as I spent a couple hours seeking photos for consecutive entries on 'Southern Writers,' 'Space Program,' 'Benjamin Spock,' and 'Sports'; and partly the genuine openness to every element of American culture, exemplified by the gap and yet connection between my first biographical entries (Thoreau and Poe) and the last entry for which I found photos (Skateboarding). The project is not only a wonderful resource for American Studies teachers and scholars, it serves as a set of always timely reminders of the breadth and value of what we do."The articles in the EAS, like the selections in the Gale volumes, are of course circumscribed by space and other limitations, and none serves as a substitute for more in-depth research into and analyses of their topics and focal points. But neither are these encyclopedias to be left to the high school students of the world (although they'd be great for them too!)—they have far too much to add to our conversations and perspectives at every level. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      The EAS: http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/2)      Info about the Gale Multicultural America books: http://www.gale.cengage.com/pdf/facts/gemapd.pdf3)      OPEN: Any great resources you'd highlight?

July 12, 2011: What's the Fantastic For?

If you've read any science fiction, you probably have a sense that one of the genre's fundamental purposes is to critique aspects of our own society from the safe distances of the future and/or outer space; as Robert Silverberg puts it, "in reading them we look backward by the brilliant light of those distant epochs to see our own era." As far back as a work like Edward Bellamy's time travel utopian novel Looking Backward (1888), through 20th century titans like Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 (1968), and into our contemporary moment, science fiction has often served precisely to create a space in which present issues and trends can be extrapolated forward and outward, and so viewed and analyzed with more clarity than might otherwise be possible. At times the resulting lens has been hopeful or humorous, at times satirical, at times bleak or cynical, but in any case it would be easy enough, I believe, to argue convincingly for the value of science fiction from an AmericanStudies lens; Bradbury's novel, to take one example, can tell us a great deal about American society in the middle of the 20th century, and particularly that society's perspectives and debates on exploration, science, religion, the environment, race, and many other crucial themes.Fantasy, on the other hand, can seem much less connected to specific national or social moments or themes, and much more broad and universal in its meanings and significance. Readers and scholars have long tried to tie J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to the unfolding events of World War II against which he wrote much of the series (between 1937 and 1949), but Tolkien resisted that connection unceasingly, and certainly his series' engagements with good and evil, heroism and cowardice, war and peace, and other such themes likewise resist any easy historical analogies or concordances. Even when a fantasy series does seem to intend its analogies more overtly—as is certainly the case with the Christian symbolism in C.S. Lewis's Narnia books—those analogies are similarly broad in scope; Lewis's Aslan the lion is without question intended to represent Jesus, but he and the books are not to my mind a commentary on the state of Christianity (or anything else) in mid-20th century England, but rather on the religion's abiding principles and beliefs. By its very nature, the genre of fantasy seems to rely on such universalizing connections, on the creation and inhabiting of worlds that are either defined by clear differences from our own or, if they seem to echo ours at all, tend to portray time periods that feel centuries earlier than our own contemporary moment.Today marks the release of A Dance with Dragons, the fifth novel in a saga that seems very much in the latter category (and is, not coincidentally to my writing about it here, my favorite series of all time): George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin's world does indeed feel deeply rooted in medieval history (and is relatively light on fantastic elements, at least compared to many fantasy series), so much so that his series has sometimes been called a fantahistorical; but that history is of course entirely distant from our 21st century American moment, especially when compared to an earlier work of Martin's such as Fevre Dream (1982), a vampire novel set on the Mississippi River during the final years of the steamboat age. Yet as I've written elsewhere in this space, I plan to start my third book with a quotation from the series' first chapter, the conversation between young Bran Stark and his father Ned about bravery and fear. Their subject there is, as Tolkien's and Lewis's were, broad and universal, applicable to any society and moment; but it's also, both in its specific and counter-intuitive image of bravery and in its general goal of revising our clichéd narratives in favor of something more challenging, genuine, and meaningful, hugely relevant to American identity and studies. Martin's books are not in any way targeted at America or our particular historical moment—there's a reason they've been translated into dozens of languages, and I can imagine them ringing just as true 100 years from now—but that doesn't mean that they don't have a great deal to say to them and us.There doesn't have to be an AmericanStudies reason to read Martin, or fantasy fiction, or anything else as great and powerful as these books are—as with all the best works of art, these give you their own reasons in spades. But if something can entertain us, move us, thrill us, affect us deeply, and make us better and stronger as a national community at the same time? That'd be pretty fantastic. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Google book of The Martian Chronicles: http://books.google.com/books?id=340yCIudlMwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false2)      Martin's own website, which includes in the Not a Blog some very interesting recent reflections on the writing of the fifth book and his series: www.georgerrmartin.com3)      OPEN: Any science fiction or fantasy that you'd say can tell us a lot about us? Or works in other genres?

July 11, 2011: The Okay American Novel

I call my teaching philosophy student-centered, and while that means many more things that I can elucidate in this one post, it certainly includes the idea that it's more important to get students reading critically at all, rather than to worry about precisely what it is that they're reading. That differentiates me from colleagues who feel that it's vital to teach certain texts or authors, to make sure that a particular canon (however it's constituted) remains part of our understanding of American (or any other) literature; while I don't go nearly as far in the opposite direction as some other colleagues, particularly those in the cultural or pop culture studies camps who have been known to teach English classes in which no creative literature gets read, I would say that for the majority of my students (not the English majors, I hasten to add, but the non-majors who largely populate my survey courses), practicing the skill of critical reading (and other concurrent skills such as analysis, argumentation, and writing) is much more productive than learning about any particular figures or texts.Yet there's a difference between an emphasis and a sole focus, and while I do emphasize such student-focused practices, I definitely try to complement them with a group of texts that are to my mind important for them to read, both for their own sake and for the historical, cultural, and other contexts to which they can connect us. In my American Literature II survey, two of the texts we read—and certainly the two most famous and canonical—are Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). There are lots of reasons why I have those novels on the syllabus—and have kept them there through six years of teaching the course—but if I had to boil them down to one each, I might say: Twain's novel is narrated by one of the most complex and authentic voices in American fiction, that of Huck himself, an authenticity driven home by that youthful and mostly innocent voice's frequent and discomfiting expressions of racism; and Fitzgerald's novel represents one of the most poignant and compelling examinations and critiques of America's ideals and myths, a theme driven home by the lyrical and evocative prose style of its novelist-narrator Nick Carraway. Not coincidentally, those elements also provide many of our best starting points for discussions of the novels—what we make of Huck's perspective on and relationship with his runaway slave companion Jim; what we do with Nick's especially lyrical and poetic reflective passages, including the opening and closing ones.As most of you likely already know, given the prominence (at least for a couple days) that the story received, a well-known Twain scholar is working on an edition of Huck (and its companion text Tom Sawyer) which revises away at least a bit of that discomfiting racism, replacing the novel's 219 uses of "nigger" with "slave." Today I read, courtesy of Roger Ebert's always thought-provoking blog, about an even more aggressive and ridiculous bowdlerization, an edition of Fitzgerald's novel for basic (and perhaps ESL) readers that clocks in at 67 pages and substitutes for the novel's lyrical prose the most banal equivalents possible; for example, the novel's justifiably famous final lines, quoted in full on Ebert's blog, have been replaced with "Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby's dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn't he?" Again, I think there's significant value in students reading at all, and I suppose it's possible to engage with Fitzgerald's themes and ideas despite such a drastic difference in language; but the bottom line is that the resulting text is not Fitzgerald's novel, just as a version of Huck without the word "nigger" does not represent the novel that Twain wrote and published. If we believe that students should read these texts, we should ask them to read them as they are and as their authors intended; otherwise, there are plenty of other choices.I suppose this might seem like shooting fish in a barrel, particularly with the Fitzgerald example; the Twain one is less extreme and so perhaps more open to debate, although I do see the two revisions as equally destructive to the original texts. But I think the larger questions, of why and what we ask students to read, and how we can wed a student-centered and practical goal with a sense of the value of particular (and often complicated) works, are far from simple, and get at the heart of much of what literature and teaching, and life, are about. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Ebert on the abbreviated Fitzgerald: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/07/_did_it_seem_to.html2)      An article on the Twain revision, which quotes my Dad: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/40917583/ns/today-books/t/edition-removes-n-word-mark-twain-classics/3)      OPEN: What do you think?

July 9-10, 2011 [Tribute post 18]: Web Feat

In regard to my two principal academic roles (as a scholar and a teacher), I generally have two pretty significantly opposed perspectives on the net worth of the worldwide web. For scholars, especially those of us for whom family and finances make extensive or frequent travel next to impossible (ie, almost all  of us!), the web has quickly become an indispensable resource: just the number of primary texts that are now archived and easily searched online is an incredible boon, but it's similarly so much easier to find and read a high percentage of the work by our fellow scholars (at least for those of us affiliated with institutions and thus with free access to databases), among other benefits. And that's to say nothing of the new forms of scholarship and community that have sprung up online, including, duh, blogs; whatever the worth of this blog itself (and hey, I'm trying), the daily links are a great indication of the breadth and depth of what we can now find and engage with online.All of those materials are likewise present and accessible for students, of course, but I'd still have to argue that for teachers the web has been at least as much (and to my mind more) of a curse than a blessing. I have pretty much no meaningful experience with having taught prior to the advent of the web (although my high school years as a student certainly qualify, and would second this point), but it seems likely to me that in the pre-web era plagiarism was nearly always a conscious and extremely premeditated act, one that required finding hard copy sources from which to plagiarize, writing out the plagiarized materials again in one's own paper, and so on. Now, on the other hand, a brief moment of panic about a paper can lead to a quick Google search which leads to that perfect paragraph on The Great Gatsby which is so easily cut and pasted into that existing paper, making plagiarism an easy and momentary (but hugely damaging) mistake. As hard I have worked and will continue to work to get students to use online materials and resources in positive and productive ways, both individually and in our communal conversations, at times I feel certain that the web's classroom presence will always remain first and foremost a deeply troubling and potentially destructive one.But I'm an optimist by nature, and if and when I need a reason to feel more optimistic about what the web can mean for students—as well as a reaffirmation of its incredible value for scholars and all interested AmericanStudiers –I've got a particularly exemplary one right in the family. My Dad, University of Virginia English Professor Stephen (Steve) Railton, has spent the past couple of decades developing two incredible scholarly websites: Mark Twain in His Times and Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture (links below). The sites are literally the pitch-perfect combination of old-school scholarship (including tons of primary sources, clear and helpful framing essays and materials by my Dad throughout, pieces by other scholars, bibliographies, and so on) and new-school technology (including ever-expanding use of images, sound, video, search technology, and so on). I can't imagine anybody who won't find something of significant interest in both, and that includes people with no explicit interest in the authors and texts in question. (Case in point 1: like to play board games? Did you know that Mark Twain invented one? My Dad's site does. Case in point 2: collect figurines? Did you know that the characters of Uncle Tom have been turned into hundreds of such figures? Ditto.) But apropos of this post, and perhaps most impressively, I know that numerous educators and classes have made great use of the sites, and that the feedback my Dad has gotten from such users has been among the most deserved and meaningful support he's gotten for any of his career's worth of great work.As with most anything in our world, it's easy to despair at times of what the web and other modern technologies have meant and done; similarly, it's easy to wonder if the benefits tend to accrue more to the haves (such as scholars at and institutions of higher education, in this case) and less to the less fortunate (such as students and non-affiliated folks, in this case). But if you need reminders of the incredible potential in the web—and ones that anybody and everybody can access fully and freely—just check out those web feats below. They come with my higher recommendation. More next week,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      The Twain site: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/index2.html2)      The Tom site: http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/3)      OPEN: Any great scholarly websites you'd highlight?

July 8, 2011: Deadly Personal (Repeat)

[Crunched for time today, but in the light of Texas's controversial execution yesterday, I thought this was a valuable repeat.]It took having my boys to make me understand the death penalty. The arguments against it had just always seemed so overwhelming—from the exorbitant costs to the racial and economic imbalances, the failures as a deterrent to, most especially, the constant and very real possibility of executing innocent men and women—that it just seemed to me that any support for it had to come purely from an emotional standpoint, purely from the desire on the part of victims' families and advocates for revenge for what they have suffered and lost. I still think that's true, but now I suppose I just get that desire much more fully than I ever had; if someone killed one of the boys, you're damn right I'd want that person to die. That doesn't mean that it should be legal—in fact, you could make the case that it is precisely my emotional investment that is the strongest argument against having it be part of our law—but it means that I get how personal this political issue can be and usually is.It's precisely that deeply personal side that made the film Dead Man Walking a success, for me—because the film wasn't trying to embody a particular political opinion or stance, but instead simply created a handful of extremely complex and realistic people (most especially Sean Penn's death row convict, but certainly also Susan Sarandon as Sister Helen Prejean, the nun working on his behalf, and an Raymond Barry as the father of one of Penn's victims, among other standout characters) and gave them room to live and breathe and grow over the course of the film. Even in the final scenes it's not only possible but, I would argue, likely for a viewer to both cry for and curse Penn's character, and that range of reactions means that watching his death scene (spoiler alert? Well, it is in the title) feels like watching a person (rather than a character, much less a political symbol) die. Which is exactly the point, of course—however you feel about the death penalty, it's personal in that way too, the state-sanctioned taking of a person's life. And the incredibly diverse and talented group of artists recruited for the film's pitch-perfect soundtrack do, by and large, a similarly impressive job of creating the voices and perspectives and stories of realistic people affected by the death penalty in all sorts of ways.There are lots of candidates for the best song on that soundtrack, but for my money it's Steve Earle's "Ellis Unit One." Earle's song is, as I wrote yesterday, barely a whisper, both in its nasally voice and minimalist music and in its seemingly insignificant speaker, a second-generation death row guard narrating the story of how he ended up on Ellis Unit One and of his experiences there. The first clue that Earle is creating something much more powerful is the chorus, the superficially unrelated "Swing low/Swing low/Swing low and carry me home." The hints in those lines are entirely borne out in the song's two final and most gut-wrenching sections: first the final verse, where the speaker awakens from a dream in which he is the one being executed, "something cold and black pumped through my lungs/And Jesus could not save me/Though I know he tried his best/But Jesus doesn't live on Ellis Unit One"; and then the final chorus, with one small but crucial change: "Swing low/Don't let go/Swing low and carry me home." Suddenly his job and world have become as personal and powerful as they can get—and if the moment doesn't take your breath away too, well, maybe you've already been euthanized.I'm not trying to sway any opinions on the death penalty—if and when I engage more directly with a political topic like this one, it won't be to proselytize, I promise—but just to highlight an amazing film and an even more amazing (and certainly less well-known) song, texts that engage with this controversial and hugely complex issue with sensitivity, humanity, and deep power. Doesn't get any more worth our attention and response than that. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Great live version of the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tc700Yi8KQ2)      An interesting article on Sister Helen Prejean and the film: http://www.americancatholic.org/messenger/Apr1996/feature1.asp3)      OPEN: What do you think?

July 7, 2011 [Scholarly Review 1]: A Good Deal

[I mentioned a while back that I was planning to dedicate an occasional, somewhat briefer but hopefully still interesting and informative post to highlight a particularly exemplary scholarly work; this is the first such post.]Given both my general interest in crossing disciplinary boundaries and my specific focus on that topic in the Abraham Cahan post from a couple days ago, it's only fitting that the first work of scholarship I'll highlight in this new type of post be a similarly boundary-busting text. Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990) doesn't just use a wide variety of media and sources—from memoirs and letters to popular and material culture, music and movies, government documents and journalism, and others—to trace and analyze her themes; she also pushes beyond one of the most accepted but false dichotomies of our national narratives: the division between "the average person" and "the government." That dichotomy is often particularly present in discussions of the Great Depression, which can tend to focus either on government policies and programs (like those comprised in the New Deal) or communal experiences (of poverty, unemployment, hunger, etc). Yet as the time frame of Cohen's book highlights, she argues instead that many of the New Deal's programs and changes were foreshadowed and influenced by earlier and ongoing communal perspectives and shifts, by changes happening at the ground level across a range of ethnic, racial, class, and other communities. This distinct emphasis and argument make Cohen's book important, but it's her writing style—accessible yet analytical, engaging yet sophisticated—that makes the book one I'm willing to highlight in this, not-just-academic, space. Cohen is a serious historian but not (just) an academic one; she recognizes that her topic is one to which all Americans connect, both in terms of the lasting effects of her time period and topics and in terms of how much they parallel many ongoing issues and crises (a context that's even more relevant in our own 21st century Great Recession). I know that many subsequent historians have taken issue with one or another of Cohen's claims or ideas, and that's as it should be; none of the books I recommend in this space are perfect, and my goal for all reading, with these other works as with my own, would be that you read them in a dialogic way, analyzing and responding and adding your own voice to the mix as you go. But for anybody who's interested in work, the city, the Depression, community life and organization, or even just some of the defining moments and issues of the 20th century, Cohen's book is a great one to add to your list.More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Excellent review/analysis of Cohen's book: http://www.kevincmurphy.com/cohen.html2)      Cohen's follow up, A Consumer's Republic: http://books.google.com/books?id=YuZPy6JqutIC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false3)      OPEN: Any exemplary works of scholarship you'd highlight? And/or ones you'd like me to include in future posts?

July 6, 2011: Trial and Error

I've written a good deal in this space, including in my March 11th post on the Treaty of Tripoli, about what I consider to be the most radical and impressive feature of America's founding documents and national government: not only the separation of church and state and the protection of religious freedom (including to be sure the freedom from religion), but also the complete absence of religion (including even the word God) from the Constitution's language and ideas. As I wrote in that earlier post, it can be easy to forget that every existing nation and government in that late 18th century moment still featured an official, state religion, and wedded church to government in a variety of key and seemingly inevitable ways; so for the framers to go out of their way to create a government with absolutely no such connections, to emphasize instead solely and centrally the right to religious freedom, was without question a bold and striking choice, and constitutes to my mind the most unique aspect of the new nation as it was founded.Less unique, but just as strikingly central to the rights guaranteed by the framers (particularly in the Bill of Rights), were two legal concepts inherited by the colonies from English common law: habeas corpus, the right not to be detained unlawfully or without charges; and trial by jury, the right to a free and fair trial by one's peers. The Constitution's version of the latter was particularly similar to existing practice: in England and in the colonies the writs of habeas corpus had legally needed the authority of the monarchy or its representatives, while the American version extended that legal right to any and every individual; trial by jury, on the other hand, looked pretty similar in post-Revolutionary America to both the pre-Revolutionary colonies and the mother country across the Atlantic. Yet it's also important to note that more amendments in the Bill of Rights served to extend and strengthen the rights of the accused than to address any other issue—as the first link below demonstrates, the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th amendments all highlight and reaffirm such rights (and the 8th's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment certainly connects as well). Because of those affirmations, it seems clear to me (although I'm far from a legal scholar) that the American version of trial by jury did go further to protect explicitly the presumption of innocence, and make explicitly difficult the task of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, than the concept's existing legal practices.Winston Churchill famously (and perhaps apocryphally, but it's a great quote) noted that "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried." The same, I believe, could be said about trial by fury as a mechanism of redressing criminal actions; there's no question that such trials allow for the possibility that criminals will get away with their crimes, and in fact they make inevitable (particularly, again, given the lengths to which the American system has always gone to protect the rights of the accused, lengths that have been extended further in the centuries since the founding with the addition of Miranda rights and other practices) that some will do so. No matter what percentage of the accused are convicted—and given that, according to some statistics, 90% of all criminal cases result in a conviction by plea bargain without going to trial, that percentage is certainly extremely high—society will always focus on those few instances when a seemingly guilty person is (outrageously, the public outcry notes) acquitted by his or her peers. It's no coincidence that three of the most popular television heroes (or anti-heroes) of the past decade can be read as direct responses to such outrages: Vic Mackey of The Shield, a corrupt policeman who feels free to go outside the law to bring criminals to justice; Jack Bauer of 24, a more idealized counter-terrorism agent who frequently does likewise; and Dexter Morgan of Dexter, a former cop who has become a serial killer in order to target other killers who have escaped justice.I'm thinking of all of this today because of Casey Anthony; I had made a valiant effort to avoid any stories or details about the case and trial throughout these months of media frenzy, but have since yesterday's not guilty verdict given in and learned a bit. It certainly seems as if Anthony did escape justice; speaking solely as a parent, I can't imagine one of my children drowning and not immediately calling 911, much less duct taping her and hiding the body, and then partying a few days later (which is Anthony's story of what she did after her daughter's death). If so, the verdict is indeed an outrageous error. But it's one that our system and nation require. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      The Bill of Rights (most readable by clicking "Read Transcript"): http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights.html2)      A story on the many Twitter links of Anthony to none other than Dexter Morgan: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2011/07/05/twitter_calls_upon_dexter_morgan_to_redress_the_casey_anthony_ve.html3)      OPEN: What do you think?